


Fade Away Never

by little_abyss



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, Canon - Movie, Crack Crossover, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gift Fic, Inspired by a Movie, Memory Related, Mild Sexual Content, Musical References, Musicians, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 22:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8865418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_abyss/pseuds/little_abyss
Summary: This is the one where Anders is punk rock, Fenris is glam, and Hawke is a music journalist caught somewhere in-between.  A shameless Velvet Goldmine-meets-Dragon Age II AU.  Complete and utter crack-treated-seriously, and I apologise for nothing.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delicate_mageflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delicate_mageflower/gifts), [un-shit-yourself (fenix_down)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenix_down/gifts).



> This happens to be a fic based on one of my favourite movies, quoting some of my favourite songs, for two of my favourite fandom people. I think you're both tops, really smashing, the best of the lot - and I hope you both enjoy this little thing. <3 Keep shining.

It all seems so long ago.  Yet the memory still feels fresh - in her mind, she still sees him under the lights, his hand outstretched as he falls to his knees there in front of them all; in her mind, she can still hear his amplified moan: _Nothing in my dreams, but some ugly memories… kiss me like the ocean breeze..._

 

Maker.  So long ago.  So close she can almost taste it.

 

Hawke sighs, pulls her beer closer to her, the wet patch it leaves on the bar reflecting the bright red neon of the advertisement behind it.  She’d been following leads to this point, had wound up here in this grotty bar following a story that no-one wanted her to write anymore.  It was all old news anyway - the future was now, so who gave a shit about some old woman’s memories of a time where it seemed the whole world could be swallowed by some lovely delirium at any moment?  The notes had changed pitch, the lyrics had all been re-written.  And yet still she held that song within herself, until it seemed her whole body was enveloped in its rhythms.

 

She’d been a fan of Fenris’ first.  That’s why she’d been given the story; it was the tenth anniversary of his disappearance from the public eye, after all.  Oh sure, there’d been sightings, and the inevitable rumours of a new album or a tour, and though some part of Hawke had tried to hope it was true, she knew in her heart of hearts that the world would never see the likes of Fenris again.  

 

Hawke smiles, staring at the bubbles rising in the amber liquid before her without seeing them at all.  Fenris.  The way he’d raised rock and roll to some kind of bastard high art.  The way he had taken convention and twisted it, mutated everything he touched into something higher, something almost perfect in its debauchery.  Impossible to tell if it had been his doing, or that of his manager, the impresario figure known as Danarius.  She shakes her head, reaching into the pocket of her jacket for her cigarettes, and frowns.  

 

Yes.  That was why she’d been given the story; why Varric - her editor - had smiled knowingly at her and said, “Might be something in that for the retrospective crowd.  Just… not too much puff, alright?” Because she knew so much about the scene, in spite of being a fringe player.  But it was more than that.  She had loved Fenris with the perfect, strangely aloof desire which he’d courted in his fans.  The posters of him on her walls in her parent’s home were languid photoshoots - his graceful form draped in red velvet and glitter, staring at the camera with a small, catlike smirk in the corner of his mouth.  Every single moment was a vision captured; it was only as she’d grown older that she’d realised what Fenris had given up to Danarius in order to make that vision a reality.

 

So, Fenris had come first.  But across the Waking Sea, down in deepest, darkest Fereldan - isn’t that how the legends always went? - there was another.  

 

If Fenris was high art, Anders was his opposite number, and every bit as beautiful for it.  Raised in the Circle system, raised by a family riddled with the worst abuses, raised by wolves, it was impossible to tell now which was the real story and which was the myth.   All Hawke knows is that their stories - Anders’ and Fenris’ - had become inseparable, and like all good stories it had attained a life of its own, shifting and mutating.  Collaborators, co-conspirators, lovers, enemies; at some stage they’d been all of these things to each other.  And then, everything had collapsed like some bright star, like some beautiful circumstance too delicate for this world.

 

She’d first heard of Anders after he’d played support for Fenris on the last leg of the _Star Wolf_ _and the Fade Spider_ tour.  She had been seventeen.  He had a rough, rasping voice, laden with desperation and a tendency toward smashing guitars and other equipment, of unpredictable and delighted anarchism in his own shows.  Together with Fenris, their stage presence was electric, troubling and liberating all in one.  She wasn’t there at the show, but the moment had gone down in legend.  

 

Hawke closes her eyes there at the bar, imagining the approach, Anders’ knowing smirk and Fenris’ predatory stalk, wild and cautious; hears the echo of the song in the back of her mind.   _Take your time, she’s only burning… this kind of experience… is necessary for her learning…_  Her throat tightens as she imagines the grip of Fenris’ hands on the back of Anders’ belt, the feel of Fenris’ hot breath gusting over the back of Anders’ knuckles as he had continued to make the guitar wail and sob, even with Fenris’ legs open around his feet as he kneels in front of him on the stage, there under the bright blue and red lights.  When the crowd had roared, had they noticed it?   It had made all the papers the next day of course.  The headlines had screamed about it, concerned parents groups had tried to have the record banned.  But it was too late.  Within the week, Hawke had moved out of her home and ridden the bus away from her old life and into the big city, chasing the vapour trail the event had left.

 

Then the Star Wolf had begun to hate what he had become, and glitter had begun its slow death.

 

Hawke sniffs, rubbing a hand underneath her nose, and shivers at the memory of that last show; the sound of his voice, soft, sweet, up on the rooftop under the stars, _Come closer.  Don’t be frightened… what’s your name?_ She shifts in her seat at the bar and sighs out smoke, rests her forehead against the palm of one hand.  The last show; ostensibly, the death of glitter, its final bout of rigor mortis.  Anders was the headline act - a tribute to the great Fenris, the Star Wolf.  Because it was a tribute, wasn’t it?  Fenris had been shot on stage only a few months prior to this, and still, everyone believed he was dead.  The realisation would come later, much later - that Fenris had faked his own death, orchestrated the entire thing to escape the incredible pressures of his management and his increasingly demanding fans.  Had Anders helped him to escape?  Hawke doesn’t know.  Certainly, their public animosity had been pushed aside in the years prior, with Fenris helping Anders back into the studio and financially supporting a tour.  No one will ever know, she supposes and smiles.  Perhaps that is alright too.

 

By the time glitter was dying, she’d had friends in bands; by then, she was making inroads into the music journalism scene herself, knew the perils of being a fan and trying to retain some semblance of professional critique.  Hawke looks at her own hand, the one holding the cigarette, there on the scarred tabletop, sees the shake in her fingers and smiles.  Anders had been so beautiful that night, his eyes dark with smudged liner, hair bright blue fire under the lights.  Naked from the waist up, scars worn like jewels, his gestures raw, his voice almost begging: _Nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories… kiss me like the ocean breeze_.  

 

She still doesn’t know what made her do it.  But she’d turned her head then, away from the stage, away from Anders, and seen… him.  The Star Wolf.  He’d changed his hair, and he was wearing dark glasses - but that stance, that shifting, fluid way of standing completely still, the way he had stared at the stage, utterly entranced by Anders - it was him.  It couldn’t be anyone else.   She’d frowned, opened her mouth to say something to the friend she’d come with… then blinked, and he was already gone.  

 

Backstage afterwards, and their eyes had locked across the room.  Anders had still been sweaty, his eyes roving helplessly around the room, barely listening to the older woman talking to him.  His mouth had opened, and he’d watched her until she’d dropped her eyes, confused.  What could he want?  And then, when she raised her eyes again, he was still there, staring at her, gorgeous, real.  What could he want?

 

Her.  Of course.  It was her.  It seemed destined.

 

Up on the rooftop, under the stars, he was there, waiting.  Curled into a corner, eyes fixed on some distant point, cigarette burning; an orange, earthbound star.  Hawke had paused, still unsure, and then he had looked at her and smiled, open and lovely, almost shy.  It was such a far cry from his stage persona that she smiled back, a perfect reflection of his own.  From there the recollection is broken into fragments - his laughter, the way the pleased feeling had coiled in her chest at the sound of it.  The way his hands had felt against her bare skin, the chill of the night air as the night air had touched it as he’d dragged the t-shirt up over her head.  The smell of him, the feel of his hair, greasy with cooled sweat, the way her lust had made the whole of her feel slick, her mouth full of the taste of him, his grip tight on the back of her neck, on her waist.  The cold bricks under the soft skin of her stomach as Anders had thrust into her, his moans in her ear, the rising pitch of them, the sudden gasp and then the whisper - “Look up!”  And the way she had, lost to the sound of his voice, completely beside herself with pleasure, all the feeling turning to wonder at the sight above her as a group of comets streaked across the heavens. _Destined_ , she had thought incoherently then, and smiled as she’d felt the heat of him against her back, felt the smile in his voice as he’d laughed in amazement.

 

That was a long time ago now.  Hawke looks down at the cigarette burning between her fingers, the head of ash threatening to tumble onto the bar.  She reaches for the ashtray, crushes it with a gesture of her wrist.  Stupid to dream.  These memories had a way of turning bitter, twisting like a knife inside her.  A snatch of song occurs to her then, echoes of Fenris’ voice down the years - _but finding, not keeping’s the lesson._ She takes a sip of her beer and suddenly does not want to be here much anymore.  So Hawke rises, digging her wallet out and casting some money on the bar.  She turns around, trying to orient herself toward the door onto the street again.

 

Under the haze of cigarette smoke, amid the miasma of middling-to-awful pop coming from the ancient Wurlitzer, he sits.  For a moment, she is frozen; she feels her eyes widening, her mind struggling against the impossibility.  But, no, it is him, Anders.  His hair is a little longer, and his cheekbones sharper than she remembers - and then he must feel her eyes upon her, and he looks her way.  And there it is, that little curl of his lip that she remembers so well; he inclines his head, in his eyes an unspoken invitation, and she approaches.

 

They talk for an hour until he gets up to leave.  “Here,” he tells her finally, unpinning the beautiful emerald coloured stone from the shoulder of his leather jacket, “Take it.  I’ve kept it too long anyway.”

Hawke shakes her head.  “I couldn’t,” she tells him, and he shrugs.  

“Suit yourself,” Anders smiles, and his eyes flick briefly to the floor, then to her face again.  He is silent, studying her, then leans forward briefly, the fingers of one hand under her chin, his stubble rough against her cheek, “Thank you.  For believing in us.”  His smell is everywhere, and briefly, Hawke closes her eyes.  “It was nothing,” she whispers, and then he is rising, turning to leave.  At the door, he looks back briefly, smiles again, and then is gone.  For a long time, Hawke stares at the space which Anders once occupied, her throat tight, and then she looks at the second beer she’d ordered and sighs, picking it up and taking a swig.

  
Something is there, oh Maker, it’s, it’s sharp and she chokes, her mind panicking.  It feels like a rock in her mouth, something there, something that shouldn’t be - she spits it into her hand.  And there, among the froth and spit, is the bright emerald stone.  Anders must have slipped it into her drink while he’d embraced her.  She smiles, open, astonished, and then laughs.  People turn to look at her briefly, then turn away again, but she does not see them, not now.  

Not ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> The songs I've quoted in this work are _[Gimme Danger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tp4srXRZDI)_ by Iggy and the Stooges, _[Baby's On Fire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXVzR6C7K94)_ , performed by the Venus in Furs, though originally by Brian Eno. And finally, _[2HB](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm_nNb1Mgsc)_ ; here also performed by the Venus in Furs, but originally by Roxy Music. That's also where the title is taken from.


End file.
